when something’s kinda rad, but not too rad

I fucking hate this website 

This may be of interest to any EU citizens who follow me. It's a citizen's initiative on banning all forms conversion therapy. If it gets sufficient support by May of next year (1 million signatures meeting thresholds in at least seven EU states), it will get a hearing in the EU parliament.

from now on your tumblr nickname is whatever you get from this sexual identity generator  ☆

No offense these are the funniest fucking tags

Whatever an “amphibious gay” is. Literally or metaphorically, We have no idea.

orally fixated gym bro

Uhuh…

What.

FIRST TRY.

well-

Finland has mandatory military service for all able-bodied men. The summons come to every man on the year they turn 18, and your service status is visible on your government records - whether you've done your service, are yet to be summoned, or deemed excempt from service and for what reasons. Even if you're blind, deaf, in a wheelchair and cognitively impaired, you still need to show up for the evaluation, though ideally you'll already have a doctor's note for the occasion that basically just says "I mean just fucking look at this guy", and the military doctor will look at you and go "yeah" and sign you off as unfit for service for the time being.

And if you get your legal gender changed, your military status updates accordingly. When I got my gender marker changed to male in my late 20s, I automatically showed up in the government systems as an adult male who has not done military service yet, and I got summons the same year. However, back then being transgender was a diagnosis that you need a doctor's evaluation on, and being trans was one of those medical conditions that give you the option to opt out of service - in the "you can go if you think you can handle it" way, but you have no obligation to volunteer. So I didn't.

I met a friend recently who mentioned that he's going to wait a few years yet before getting his gender legally changed, so he can age out of the conscription system and avoid summons altogether. I said that I was released from service due to trans diagnosis, and asked if he can't do so as well. He said no - the law has been changed since I transitioned, and now that you no longer require a medical diagnosis to be trans, it is also not a diagnosis that'd make you excempt from the military.

So the finnish government basically just said "if you're a grown man with nothing wrong with you, then you're a grown man with nothing wrong with you. Now grab this fucking gun and do your duty for fatherland."

i think this covers the vast majority of the world but please correct me if i messed up!

for the purposes of this poll, the north american black bear & the asian moon bear are both "black bears". two of the best known brown bear subspecies are north american grizzly bears and eurasian brown bears, but there are many brown bears!

hey fellow Europeans (EU), just a friendly and mildly concerned reminder that in less than a month, the European elections are taking place. it's an election with a historically low turnout, but one that is just as important as any other, if not more. the composition of the EU parliament determines the political direction of the EU, and has an impact on all 27 countries through directives and regulations that get voted.

we cannot let far right extremist parties get an even bigger stronghold there than they already do. sadly, there are very significant threats of exactly that happening from many countries.

so please, if you are an EU citizen living in the EU and are of voting age, check the modalities to vote in your country of residence, and make sure to make your voice heard.

ok i wanna make a hated foods poll as a very picky autistic

Tell me why you don't like the thing you picked (flavor, texture, something else?)

RB for more results

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies' choices?

so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.

in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner

the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.

("watch a demonstration" is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)

you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.

the 6-way "sexagon" was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.

the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn't matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.

the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:

it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.

this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.

so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool

but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism

THE REPLIES ARE KILLING ME I LOVE HOW EVERYONE IMMEDIATELY GOES ‘OBI-WAN’

@karanan

Ascension

Elden Ring screenshot, composition study

I’ll post what’s depicted here tomorrow!

It was tarnished!

@bergamotbitsj

I’ve been noticing some confusion in the notes regarding what culture this is, so here’s some more info!

The girl in the video is Sámi. The Sámi are an indigenous people from the region of Sápmi, which encompasses northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

The traditional clothing of Sámi people look different depending on which area tradition they belong to. This girl is north Sámi and she’s wearing a Lyngen dress (ivgu gákti in the north Sámi language), which means her family/ancestors came from Lyngen, Norway. Lyngen’s proximity to the sea made fishing a common means of livelihood for the Sámi living there, which earned them the name “sea Sámi”.

The girl in the video mentions that Sámi people get harassed a lot on the 17th of May, which is the Constitutional Day / National Day of Norway.

@karanan

hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

oh, Sisyphus! i got you

@karanan

Good/Bad/Ugly

SO. I've held off on making this post for months, but I'm up to the wire right now. However!!!! I do actually have an end time for the first time!!!! And there is actually good news for once!!!!!!!

THE GOOD

After 10 months of searching, I FINALLY have a new job! And it's actually got a semi-livable salary!! As in I will be able to cover rent and bills without having to beg for help!!

THE BAD

Due to when I got the job and when I start the job, I won't get my first month's pay until the END OF JUNE. And I pay rent and bills in the first week of every month. So I'm going to be paying rent and bills twice more before I start getting paid.

THE UGLY

I pay rent on the 3rd of every month, followed by all the bills in that same week. As previously stated, I've spent the past 10 months paying all of this out of my savings--which are now basically nothing. As in I actually only had enough money left to pay for one more month and then I would be bankrupt and homeless and I was holding off on making this post because I just couldn't face verbalising it!

This is on the horizon until I'm well-established at work, but is no longer going to be an imminent threat. It IS still an issue thanks to a fun confluence of three events, however:

So, yes. Unfortunately I do need help to just make ends meet in the middle bit until my salary kicks in and I can cover everything myself. The good news is that I will no long need help after July!!!! I can in fact help other people after July!!!!! I'm so glad I'm finally hired again!!! But I need help to get to July. Because I'm really going to be skin-of-my-teething this one, and I've been unable to say anything because I also came down with the fucking flu last week.

If you have the means and WANT to help, my Paypal is here, if you want to help and don't have the means--please just share this post!!!

If neither, at the very least thank you for reading this and send me good vibes for my first day which will be at the end of June!!! I've lost a lot of sleep and joy over this the past months, the employment landscape is fucking miserable right now, and I'm finally able to see the end of the tunnel.

I asked my friends on Discord if they used "psipsipsi" or "swswsw" when they are trying to call kitties, and I got a wide array of answers and it got me wondering--

How do you

Thank you to @space-glitter-gay, @frogs-under-logs, @justoneofthosebibliophiles, and Virginia for the blessing and the other options!

And to thank you for your answer, here's a photo of our adopted kitten:

Ok wait let her speak

Please give evidence beyond “I hate them” or “I like sleeping in” or “I have to get up early”, none of which is actual evidence

Signed

an actual morning person

Night person who needs to see a doctor/get your car worked on/go to the bank/buy groceries, etc? You're gonna have to sacrifice sleep for it. Because for some reason it was decided that most places of business should open in the morning and close in the evening. Fewer and fewer places are 24/7. Wanna go for a nice stroll in the park? Tough shit, they close at sundown. Hell, want to just go for a walk in general? Fair chance of being harassed by the cops because being out and about in the dark is "suspicious" behavior. Want something that's not fast food and don't want to/can't cook for yourself? Best we can do is a diner like Denny's or IHOP. Got a loved one in the hospital you want to visit between work and sleep? Either gotta get up early or stay up late to meet visiting hours.

And let's not forget, no matter how little you actually sleep and how much you actually get done, if you're not awake during certain hours it means you're a lazy good-for-nothing. Express a desire for more places open 24/7? Selfish and entitled. Complain about how noisy your neighbors are during your sleep hours? Well you can't expect the world to tiptoe around you. But also you'd better keep it down at night because other people are sleeping!

But don't worry! There are plenty of guides on how to "fix" your sleep schedule out there! You just have to follow a strict, often disruptive routine that you can never stray from even a little or else you'll fall back to your natural sleep schedule lazy, undisciplined ways.

And at that, good luck finding a job that doesn't expect you to be in by 9 AM at the latest. Which means getting up at 7:30 AM at the latest, earlier if you have a commute. Which means getting to bed at 11:30 PM at the latest.

Which means night owls have a straight choice between self-employment/freelance work, with all its insecurities, or constant self-torture. (Oh yeah, sleep deprivation does count as torture, per the UN.)

That's because humans are luminous beings.

Literally.

We glow, very, very, very slightly to our own perceptible eyesight.

People who get pregnant, when we say they "glow," we are not speaking hyperbolically.

This fractionally miniscule hominid luminescence of ours actually, literally, measurably increases when a person gets pregnant.

We are not beings of immeasurable darkness.

We are beings of light.

And we can see that about ourselves, if we try.

Go spend some time on male pattern baldness or male(AMAB) balding forums/subreddits and such. I did after realizing it is happening to me and the ammount of people who truly don't realize how BRUTALLY it tanks people's confidence and mental health is insane.

There's no cure to baldness by the way, and it can start at any time and there's no way to predict how fast or slow it will go. The only real working option is a daily pill that usually just halts it, but it can stop working or just slow it down or cause major side effects. To regrow you have to use a daily topical solution, or use a roller to wound your scalp. None of these are surefire by the way, and if you stop them you'll just lose your hair and whatever you regained. It's a daily involved thing that might not work and often at best just retains. The best drug, the one that occasionaly gives regrowth, also causes shedding at the start, and can have side effects from growing breasts to brain fog to EDsyfunction(sorry, censoring cause tumblr). Now, those are INCREDIBLY rare and almost never happen but it weighs heavily on the mind of those already spiraling.

But that's just background. What I'm here to talk about is the pure woe you'll see on those forums. People speak as though their lives are over, as though they've lost every chance of finding a woman(predominantly, there's a running idea in such places that women don't like bald men or like them less) or doing anything. You can read countless stories of people who describe that they no longer go outside, are now filled with anxiety and self-hate, have gone from extroverted to never showing their face. And some of these people are kids who lost their hair in high school or even before, or are holding as best they can to a very receded hairline and feel like there is nothing they can do.

And then there's something touched upon far less in those communities, but is important to bring up here; baldness and masculinity. There's the horror of knowing so much of society sees a bald guy as a very masculine guy, at seeing that the best advice for being hot and bald is "grow and beard and big muscles bro". Imagine now you're AMAB balding and nonbinary, or a trans woman who doesn't want to be on hormones.

Just genuinely take the time to look at those forums no matter who you are. Understand what these people go through, what I am currently going through. It is soul-crushing, spiraling, brutal. I have the dream of one day being like Brennan Lee Mulligan or Matt Mercer and starting to lose my hair made me feel like I could never. I felt like and still feel like I would have to be masculine, have to be a bro-y dude, have to look older than I was(I'm fuckin 22). It was the feeling that I could never dress feminine again, never present as a woman when I wanted to again, that I'd always be viewed as a bald guy before anything else.

This is an incredibly vulnerable post for me, and I hope it reaches you all as well in a kind and understanding mood. There's a tendency online for people to joke about baldness, to make fun of it, to treat it as a playfull silly thing but it fucking ruins lives, and it shouldn't. It happens to half the population's sort of bodies and very often. It should just be a neutral thing. You don't need long hair to be feminine, you don't need hair to be feminine. You don't need hair for anything. I guess I'm just saying in general that everyone should be kinder about balding, more understanding, and view it with as much import as they'd view the pixels between this sentence and the next. None at all, I mean.

And for those like me, very feminine guys who wanna keep that and don't want a beard and are terrified of balding, here's some names and I do hope others that see this will add more; Mr. Bruce (also in The Correspondents(band) Alex Ward in LA By Night Jason Carl in LA By Night Cecil Baldwin of Welcome To Night Vale Bob The Drag Queen RuPaul(in looks alone, I know about the whole fracking stuff but this post is about looks) tananasho on instagram Also your mannerisms and style of dress will convey femininity far more than your hair. Yea sure a front-on neutral shot of you may not and maybe you need makeup and stuff, and hell maybe a lot of people might reject you more but it'll just filter down to the people for you.

And to all you artists and writers and creatives; make more bald characters. Try it out. Feminine ones, masculine ones, all sorts. None of the copout nonhuman sort, just dudes and girls and mates and individuals who are all sorts of things and also bald. It might make a few of the people going through the various vortexes of pain that balding causes feel a bit better.

And to those noticing I did not adress female hair loss much here, that was intentional. I am AMAB and currently a nonbinary guy who goes by any pronouns but often likes to present as fem. I learned I was possibly losing my hair and lost two months of my life, no work or going or anything, to male hair loss forums and research and spiraling. Checking my hair twenty times a day, unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to think. And my situation was NOT unique, but it also did not give me any experience or understanding of female hair loss and what AFAB people may go through with that, so I don't feel knowledgeable enough to speak on it. Also living with baldness WILL get easier and you will find something that works for it, by virtue of simply living with it. Things get easier with time.

Sasha Velour is a genderfluid drag queen who does bald drag! Her baldness is a style choice inspired by her mother, who died of cancer in 2015. Her mother struggled with self confidence and feeling beautiful when chemo made her lose her hair, so part of Sasha’s drag is to honor her and show the world that you can be beautiful and feminine without hair!